Affandi

Biography

The first major picture in which his own method can be seen is “Carrying the First Grandchild”, dated 1953. The paint on it is squeezed onto the canvas directly from the tube.

By Affandi’s own account, he found the technique by accident. One day he lost a pencil, ran out of patience and drew a line with the tube instead. He liked the result: the objects on the canvas seemed to him more alive. Later he began to work with his hands as well, because without a brush he felt freer to express his feelings. He acknowledged a similarity to Van Gogh.

He was born on 18 May 1907 in Cirebon, in West Java. His father, Raden Koesoema, worked at a sugar factory (sources differ: supervisor, surveyor or manager) and wanted his son to become a doctor. Affandi was drawn to drawing. He attended school in Batavia, today’s Jakarta, and then gave up his studies. He worked as a teacher and a cinema ticket-collector, designed film posters and was a house painter. In 1933 he married Maryati, who also painted; their daughter Kartika became an artist.

From 1934 he taught himself to paint. His only teachers, he said, were the reproductions in the London magazine Studio. He felt a kinship with the Impressionists, Goya, Edvard Munch, Bruegel, Bosch and Botticelli. In the late 1930s the first exhibitions of Western art were held in Batavia, showing Gauguin, Kandinsky and Picasso, and they made a strong impression on him. He was also fascinated by wayang, the Javanese shadow theatre: he moved with his family to Bandung and then to Batavia and painted subjects for that theatre in oils. He agreed with his wife that he would spend the first ten days of each month earning money by his trade and give the remaining twenty to painting. To his own surprise, he began to sell his first works.

During the Japanese occupation, in 1942–1943, he exhibited his pictures for the first time and worked in the cultural department of the Poetera organisation alongside the future president Sukarno. He supported the struggle against Dutch colonial rule with posters; one of them, “Boeng, ayo Boeng” (“Come on, brother!”), after a text by the poet Chairil Anwar, became widely known. In 1947 he founded the group People’s Painters, in 1952 he became one of the founders of the Indonesian Artists’ Union, and he belonged to Lekra, the People’s Cultural Institute. From 1945 he lived in Yogyakarta.

One day in Yogyakarta, soon after the war, he was painting a market where half-starved people wandered about. A youth threw a handful of dust at him and at the canvas and shouted that the man was mad. Affandi himself said that he painted suffering: an old woman, a beggar, a black mountain. In India, he recalled, his daughter showed him a dead body under a mattress and said it was a good subject. He answered that he would not paint it, and painted a flower.

From 1949 to 1951 he travelled in India and worked a great deal; a scholarship from the Indian government helped to pay for the journey. He then showed his pictures in Paris, London, Brussels and Rome. He exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial in 1952 and 1956, and at the 1954 Venice Biennale he received an award. He visited the United States three times; in 1957 he received a scholarship there to study arts education, and Ohio State University in Columbus made him an honorary professor of painting. He took part in painting the murals of the East-West Center in Hawaii and in the world’s fair Expo 70 in Osaka. In 1974 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Singapore, in 1977 the Peace Award of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, and in Florence the title of Grand Maestro.

He designed his house in Yogyakarta himself. The roof follows the shape of a leaf from the tree under which he had sheltered from a downpour, and the tall single room stands on supports that resemble two tree trunks; the carved trunks for it were made by the Balinese sculptor Nyoman Tjokot. In time four galleries grew up around the house, holding about 250 paintings by Affandi, as well as works by his daughter and his other children. What draws me in this story is that for his own pictures he built a building modelled on a tree.

Affandi died on 23 May 1990 in Yogyakarta. He is buried in the grounds of his museum, among his paintings, as he wished. One of the roads leading into the city bears his name: Jalan Affandi, formerly Jalan Gejayan.